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ABSTRACT
Ugolini examines the contested nature of Second World War commemoration among the Italian diasporic community in Britain. Traditionally, many ethnic groups in Britain use evidence of war-time military service as a way of forging a sense of belonging in the national imaginary but Italian memorialization tends to focus on the war-time experience of internment rather than service in the British forces. In particular, Ugolini assesses the communal neglect of the heroic story of Fusilier Dennis Donnini, a Victoria Cross winner of Italian parentage. She argues that the silence surrounding second-generation Italians who fought in British uniform reflects the durability of the concept of the ‘good Italian’ that prevailed in the interwar period when Mussolini's Fascist regime aimed ‘to secure the allegiance’ of diasporic communities to the Fascist movement in Italy. The configuration of the ‘enemy alien’ internee as the ‘good Italian’ within memorial activity reinforces the historiographic displacement of the experiences of those who served, and died, in British uniform. While Dennis Donnini VC embodies heroism and martial valour, his experience does not conform to the dominant narrative of war-time victimhood that, in turn, succeeds in diverting attention away from the complexities of Italian diasporic allegiances and an interwar communal elite compromised by it apparent support of Fascism.
Notes
1Dennis Donnini's entry in the Debt of Honour register, available on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website at www.cwgc.org/search-for-war-dead/casualty/2055259/DONNINI,%20DENNIS (viewed 1 May 2012). See also John Laffin, British VCs of World War 2: A Study in Heroism (Stroud, Glos: Sutton Publishing 1997), 163–4; J. C. Kemp, The History of the Royal Scots Fusiliers 1919–1959 (Glasgow: Privately printed by Robert Maclehose for the Royal Scots Fusiliers 1963).
2Lucio Sponza, ‘The internment of Italians in Britain’, in Franca Iacovetta, Roberto Perin and Angelo Principe (eds), Enemies Within: Italian and Other Internees in Canada and Abroad (Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press 2000), 276; Terri Colpi, The Italian Factor: The Italian Community in Great Britain (Edinburgh: Mainstream 1991), 72.
3For more information on the calculation of this figure, see Wendy Ugolini, Experiencing War as the ‘Enemy Other’: Italian Scottish Experience in World War II (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2011).
4Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Antisemitism in British Society during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1989), 123.
5Phrase used by Reed Ueda in ‘The changing path to citizenship: ethnicity and naturalization during World War II’, in Lewis A. Erenberg and Susan E. Hirsch (eds), The War in American Culture: Society and Consciousness during World War II (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1996), 207.
6Richard Wright, ‘Italian Fascism and the British-Italian Community, 1928–43: Experience and Memory’, PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 2005, 150.
7The Italian nationality law of 13 June 1912 stated that an Italian citizen ‘shall retain Italian citizenship if born and resident in any foreign State where he shall be considered a natural-born citizen of that State’: see the report ‘Recruitment of persons of dual nationality into the Army’, Appendix A: National Archives, Kew, KV 4/290.
8Hansard, House of Commons Written Answers, 26 May 1944, vol. 400, col. 1064W.
9A. W. Brian Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention without Trial in Wartime Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1992), 65.
10Colpi, The Italian Factor, 100.
11Luca de Caprariis, ‘“Fascism for export”? The rise and eclipse of the Fasci Italiani all'estero’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 35, no. 2, 2000, 151–83 (151).
12Quoted in Gaetano Salvemini, Italian Fascist Activities in the United States (New York: Centre for Migration Studies 1977), 57.
13Claudia Baldoli, Exporting Fascism: Italian Fascists and Britain's Italians in the 1930s (Oxford: Berg 2003), 1.
14Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 2010), 13.
15Baldoli, Exporting Fascism, 2.
16Baldoli, Exporting Fascism, 27.
17Baldoli, Exporting Fascism, 17. See also John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1972), 116; and Joe Pieri, The Scots-Italians: Recollections of an Immigrant (Edinburgh: Mercat Press 2005), 67.
18Letter from Vernon Kell to Chief Constables, September 1938: National Archives, Kew, KV 4/291.
19‘Italian Armistice Day’, Scotsman, 5 November 1926, 10.
20‘Italy's Armistice Day’, Scotsman, 5 November 1929, 11.
21Anne-Marie Fortier, Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity (Oxford: Berg 2000), 134; Richard Bosworth, ‘The internment of Italians in Australia’, in Iacovetta, Perin and Principe (eds), Enemies Within, 227–55 (233).
22‘Summary of the Arandora Star inquiry conducted by Lord Snell’, 1940: National Archives, Kew, KV 4/337, 4.
23‘Confidential report on Lorenzo Ogni to Major Woolf’, 25 August 1944: National Archives, Kew, HO 45/25761.
24Philip Morgan, The Fall of Mussolini: Italy, the Italians, and the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), 5.
25‘Eight V.C.s and two G.C.s to next of kin’, The Times, 18 July 1945, 7.
26Lewis Dino Donnini's entry in the Debt of Honour Register available on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website at www.cwgc.org/search-for-war-dead/casualty/2838002/DONNINI,%20LEWIS%20DINO (viewed 1 May 2012); ‘Died in winning V.C. at 19’, Guardian, 21 March 1945, 5.
29Supplement to the London Gazette of 16 March 1945 (20 March 1945), 1485.
27The ironic nature of this encounter is heavily emphasized in present-day accounts that include the assertion that Alfredo Donnini was initially barred entry into Buckingham Palace because of his alien status. See ‘100 North East heroes’, Sunday Sun (Newcastle), 15 October 2006; ‘The pocket-sized hero who never saw his medal’, Northern Echo, 4 July 2005.
28Harold E. Raugh, Jr, The Victorians at War 1815–1914: An Encyclopaedia of British Military History (Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford: ABC-CLIO 2004), 332.
30Gabriel Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 1914–1930: A Study of ‘Unconquerable Manhood’ (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate 2007), 75–6.
31John Yarwood, ‘Our first VC’, Journal of National Union of General and Municipal Workers, May 1945, 131.
32Koureas, Memory, Masculinity and National Identity in British Visual Culture, 76.
33‘100 North East heroes’.
34Phil Doherty, ‘Honour our hero family fight on’, Sunday Sun (Newcastle), 29 July 2001.
35Jez Lowe and The Bad Pennies, ‘Donnini Doolally’, Doolally, CD, released Tantobie Records, 2004.
36Mike Chapell, Scottish Divisions in the World Wars (Oxford: Osprey 1994), 61.
37Harry Kilmurry, ‘4/5th Bn the Royal Scots Fusiliers Reunion Association’, Journal of The Royal Highland Fusiliers, vol. 24, no. 2, 2000, 47–8, available on the Royal Highland Fusiliers website at http://rhf.org.uk/JOURNAL/RHF2000.pdf (viewed 1 May 2012).
38Yarwood, ‘Our first VC’.
39Penny Summerfield and Corinna Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2007), 207–8; Kate Fisher, Birth Control, Sex, and Marriage in Britain 1918–1960, 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), 25; Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge 1994), 24.
40Interview with Alex Margiotta, 3 May 1999: University of Edinburgh, School of Scottish Studies Archive, SA 1999.29.
41Interview with ‘Domenico Natale’ (pseud.), 19 August 1999: University of Edinburgh, School of Scottish Studies Archive, SA 2002.052.
43Yarwood, ‘Our first VC’.
42See Colpi, The Italian Factor, 193; and Lucio Sponza, Divided Loyalties: Italians in Britain during the Second World War (Bern and New York: Peter Lang 2000), 59.
44This is encapsulated in Alfred Duff Cooper's infamous radio broadcast on 10 June 1940 when, referring back to ‘the disgraceful flight of the Italian Army at Caporetto’, he declared ‘that Italy will prove a liability rather than an asset’ (quoted in ‘Italy declares war on Britain’, Scotsman, 11 June 1940, 5).
45See the website of the organization of Anglo Jewish Ex-Servicemen (now Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women) at www.ajex.org.uk (viewed on 2 May 2012); and Kathy Burrell, ‘Male and female Polishness in post-war Leicester: gender and its intersections in a refugee community’, in Louise Ryan and Wendy Webster (eds), Gendering Migration: Masculinity, Femininity and Ethnicity in Post-war Britain (Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate 2008), 71–87 (77).
46Elaine McFarland, ‘“How the Irish paid their debt”: Irish Catholics in Scotland and voluntary enlistment, August 1914–July 1915’, Scottish Historical Review, vol. 82, no. 2, 2003, 261–84 (262); Keith Jeffery, Ireland and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000).
47D. G. Boyce, ‘“That party politics should divide our tents”: nationalism, unionism and the First World War’, in Adrian Gregory and Senia Pašeta (eds), Ireland and the Great War: ‘A War to Unite Us All’? (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2002), 190–216.
48Richard Mendelsohn, ‘The Jewish war: Anglo-Jewry and the South African war’, in Greg Cuthbertson, Albert Grundlingh and Mary-Lynn Suttie (eds), Writing a Wider War: Rethinking Gender, Race, and Identity in the South African War, 1899–1902 (Athens: Ohio University Press 2002), 247–65 (249).
49Panikos Panayi, The Enemy in our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War (Oxford and New York: Berg 1991).
50David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), 117.
51David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), 117.
52David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1994), 118.
53Wendy Webster, ‘Britain and the refugees of Europe 1939–50’, in Ryan and Webster (eds), Gendering Migration, 35–51 (36).
54Gordon Williams, British Theatre in the Great War: A Revaluation (London: Continuum 2005), 127–8; ‘Heroism in brief’, The Times, 24 January 1916, 4.
55Peter Belmonte, Italian Americans in World War II (Chicago: Arcadia 2001), 6.
56Salvatore J. LaGumina, The Humble and the Heroic: Wartime Italian Americans (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press 2006), 128.
57Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 351.
58Stephen Fox, UnCivil Liberties: Italian Americans under Siege during World War II (Boca Raton, FL: Universal Publishers 2000), 148; Carol L. McKibben, Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women Immigration, and Community in Monterey, California 1915–99 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2006), 87–8.
59LaGumina, The Humble and the Heroic, 88; Fox, UnCivil Liberties, 259.
60LaGumina, The Humble and the Heroic, 153, 186.
61LaGumina, The Humble and the Heroic, 179–84.
62LaGumina, The Humble and the Heroic, 86, 185.
68Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave 8: 1939–46 (London: Chatto and Windus 1969), 97. Another body with the initials O. F. stitched into his suit made by Dunn of Piccadilly, wearing a scapular of the Sacred Heart, was given a Catholic burial in St Brendan's graveyard.
63David Williams, Wartime Disasters at Sea: Every Passenger Ship Loss in World Wars I and II (Sparkford, Somerset: Patrick Stephens 1997), 242.
64Sponza, Divided Loyalties, 105.
65For the Irish press accounts, see M. S. Balestracci, Arandora Star: Una tragedia dimenticata (Parma: Millenium Editrice 2006).
66‘Arandora Star: some bodies recovered’, Guardian, 13 August 1940, 2.
67On 2 November 1991, the centenary of his birth, Camozzi was remembered at a special memorial mass. ‘The strange story of a Carndonagh grave’, Derry Journal, 2 July 2010, available online at www.derryjournal.com/news/local/the-strange-story-of-a-carndonagh-grave-1-2146642 (viewed 29 May 2012).
74Faith Compton Mackenzie, ‘Mario Serena’, 281.
69Faith Compton Mackenzie, ‘Mario Serena’, in Mackenzie, My Life and Times, Appendix D, 281–3.
70Mackenzie, My Life and Times, 96.
71Lucio Sponza, Italian Immigrants in Nineteenth-century Britain: Realities and Images (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1988), 119.
72Lucio Sponza, ‘The anti-Italian riots, June 1940’, in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence in Britain 1840–1950 (Leicester: Leicester University Press 1993), 131–49 (140). For racialized constructions of Italians as sources of urban degeneracy, see Fortier, Migrant Belongings, 31.
73Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 1989), 116.
75Faith Compton Mackenzie, ‘Mario Serena’, 283.
76See Ugolini, Experiencing War as the ‘Enemy Other’.
77Fortier, Migrant Belongings, 56.
78Fortier, Migrant Belongings, 93.
79Umberto Marin, Italiani in Gran Bretagna (Rome: Centro Studi Emigrazione 1975), 87.
80Terri Colpi, Italians Forward: A Visual History of the Italian Community in Great Britain (Edinburgh: Mainstream 1991), 145.
81See Owen Logan, Bloodlines: Vite allo specchio (Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications 1994); Andrew O'Hagan, Personality (London: Faber 2003); and Francine Stock, A Foreign Country (London: Chatto and Windus 1999).
82Pietro Zorza, Arandora Star: Il dovere di ricordarli (Glasgow: Italiani in Scozia 1985), 52–8.
83Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2003). Foibe were deep cracks in the Istria region where around 500–700 Italians were killed by Yugoslav partisans co-operating with Italian communists during the Second World War.
84Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2003). Foibe were deep cracks in the Istria region where around 500–700 Italians were killed by Yugoslav partisans co-operating with Italian communists during the Second World War, 144.
85Zorza, Arandora Star, 9.
86Alessandro Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press 1997), 157.
87Colpi, The Italian Factor, 273; Alan Davis, ‘Italian casualties, SS Arandora Star’, April 2010, available on the Isle of Colonsay website at www.colonsay.org.uk/AStarItalian%20Notes.htm (viewed 3 May 2012).
88Gavin Madeley, ‘An island remembers’, Daily Mail, 27 June 2005, 13.
89Bill Niven, ‘Introduction: German victimhood at the turn of the millennium’, in Bill Niven (ed.), Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006), 1–25 (20).
90Liz Stanley, Mourning Becomes . . . Post/memory and Commemoration of the Concentration Camps of the South African War 1899–1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2006), 11.
91Liz Stanley, Mourning Becomes . . . Post/memory and Commemoration of the Concentration Camps of the South African War 1899–1902 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2006), 114.
92Minutes, ‘Conference on move of Prisoners of War and Internees to Canada’, 17 June 1940: National Archives, Kew, KV 4/337.
93Peter Elson, ‘A fitting tribute to the lives lost on the Arandora Star’, Liverpool Daily Post, 7 July 2008.
94Niven, ‘Introduction’, 20.
95Stanley, Mourning Becomes . . ., 7.
96Colpi, The Italian Factor, 193.
97Home Office memorandum, 18 February 1942: National Archives, Kew, HO 213/1662.
98Colpi, The Italian Factor, 111–12.
99Detention order for Gilda Camillo, 10 April 1942: National Archives, Kew, HO 45/25759, 3–4.
100Interview with Norma Ventisei, 22 October 2000: University of Edinburgh, School of Scottish Studies Archive, SA 2002.060.